Solar employment by the numbers

93,502 People working in solar industry in August, double the figure of a year earlier

24,000 New jobs forecast for the next 12 months

50% Share of solar employers expecting to increase employment in next 12 months

2% Share that anticipate reducing employment

14 Solar workers in the average installation firm

24 Solar workers in the average solar manufacturing firm

Source: The Solar Foundation

In Otay Mesa, 130 workers staff three shifts making solar panels by encasing solar cells fragile as eggshells in glass and polymers.

About 20 miles away, 70 workers at a competing company do the same thing.

Both San Diego factories, Siliken in Otay Mesa and Kyocera in Kearny Mesa, are doing work that is often done cheaper elsewhere, primarily China.

And they’re doing it in Southern California, a place often derided as being inhospitable to manufacturing.

The Spanish and Japanese companies that opened the local manufacturing lines in the past year say other factors make up for the cost of doing business here.

And the companies are a sign of what’s to come, in part because San Diego is a leading market for solar installations in the state.

They can tap into a skilled workforce, take advantage of economic incentives, and by being closer to customers, they save transportation costs and provide better service.

But they can also put something on the finished panels that a Chinese manufacturer cannot: A “Made in the USA” label.

That’s important for some customers and essential for others.

Some government projects that rely on federal stimulus funding must use American-made components. And some customers simply prefer to pay more for something made here.

The solar business is building on research and infrastructure done by other high- technology companies, said Lisa Bicker, who heads Cleantech San Diego, a nonprofit focused on encouraging green companies to develop and locate here.

About 190 of her group’s members are in the solar business, and while many are installers, “there’s quite a bit of innovation occurring here in San Diego around solar technology,” she said.

The region’s plentiful sunshine is matched by engineers and scientists who have been working on the concept for years.

Engineers at the University of California San Diego are developing ultraefficient solar panels, which are years from production.

Other scientists are working on how to integrate power storage with green power sources to make something that utilities and users can rely on without needing backup fossil- fueled power plants.

In Poway, startup Energy Innovations recently opened a factory and a research center aimed at developing solar panels that follow the sun across the sky and use lenses to focus rays onto tiny photovoltaic cells.

But manufacturing by companies like Kyocera and Siliken are an important, if not as flashy, part of the business. To be sure, the local factories — which are each capable of producing about 30 megawatts of panels a year — are a fraction of the market.

Kyocera has a sister factory in Tijuana that can produce nearly 10 times as many panels as the manufacturing line that opened in June.

But demand has been strong enough that one of the two factories, Siliken, has already doubled its capacity by adding extra shifts.

“The more solar installations you have in a region, the more economical it is to have the manufacturing capacity here,” said San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders.

Both factories are within zones that give manufacturers incentives and opened up here even as dropping panel prices have led solar manufacturers in other states to close up shop and move overseas.

“These are real jobs for a diverse cross-section of San Diego,” Bicker said. “You’re going to see a wider range of job opportunities in solar manufacturing because of the diversity of solar application we see here.”

In the year since the Siliken factory opened, 30-year-old Daisy Rodriguez has been promoted from operating a soldering machine to trimming and framing panels to supervising other workers.

She finds the job more satisfying than her former work at a police equipment factory.

“This is important,” she said. “We save lives with this.”

Like most of Siliken’s workers, Rodriguez is bilingual, a key skill for the factory’s Spanish owners.

Equipment controls, specifications and manuals are all in Spanish, and locating here allowed the factory to begin operation even as the technical writings were translated into English.

In addition to the language question, Siliken was drawn by a strong market, said Scott Sporrer, who heads the company’s U.S. headquarters in Carlsbad.

“It came down to the fact that California has been a leader in this area,” he said. “It made sense to have content that was local, that was servicing the local market.”

The business environment here beat out San Francisco and Los Angeles, he said.

Still, the recession caused the factory to open about two years later than anticipated.

For Kyocera, the decision to open a line the United States was driven in part by the desire to sell into projects financed with stimulus funds.

The decision to do it in San Diego was driven by the company’s history.

“It’s a natural progression for us,” said Tom Dyer, a senior vice president with the company’s solar division. “We’ve been here a long time, in San Diego. We like the region.”

Kyocera, which makes cell-phone handsets, chips, photocopiers and other products, has had its U.S. headquarters in San Diego for about 40 years.

It knows how to manufacture here.

“It does cost a bit more to manufacture in the U.S. than in Mexico,” Dyer said. “There are advantages in the U.S. in terms of freight and going across the border. … Our facility is fairly automated, so it is not driven by labor costs.”

Sanders, the mayor, said he hoped the Kyocera and Siliken factories would lead to more manufacturing locally.

“It’s kind of validating some of the economic development work we’ve been working on,” he said. “It makes other people look at us and realize we’re a hotbed in that type of technology and that kind of investment.